Five-Story Housing-Storage Project in Downtown Santa Barbara Gets Bad Review

It was only a pre-application consultation, but the members of Santa Barbara’s Architectural Board of Review did not hold back regarding their distaste for a potential five-story big-block housing and self-storage mixed-use concept proposed just one block away from Paseo Nuevo on De la Guerra Street.

“This project is absurd as it’s been presented,” boardmember Will Sofrin said during the April 2 hearing, the first time the city has gotten a look at the proposal, which in initial renderings appear as a 60-foot white wall of housing at 102 West De la Guerra Street and, behind it, a four-story green storage building covered with ivy.

“I think it’s something like a Holiday Inn that I’d see at Disneyland,” Sofrin said.

Board Vice Chair Dennis Whelan said the project “does not fit” and was “out of character” with the surrounding neighborhood, which is currently a block of one- to three-story buildings. The proposed five-story housing portion of the project is just a few feet from the sidewalk, with 40 studios, each around 400 square feet, stacked with eight on each floor.

Boardmember Richard Six said that it was “extremely overbuilt footprint-wise and height-wise,” and that he could not accept it as currently proposed. “There needs to be a lot of rethinking and a radical reduction of the project,” he said.

“I would have to agree,” said boardmember David Black. “Just going out to the site, standing on the sidewalk, and trying to imagine a 60-foot mass towering above the sidewalk is just, for me, very troubling.”

The project’s applicant, REthink Development’s Greg Reitz, and architect Brian Cearnal of the Cearnal Collective, both came before the board hoping to receive direction on the project. Reitz explained that self-storage was one of the only possible uses for part of the site, which sits adjacent and across from two designated historic buildings — the former Santa Barbara Telephone Company Building on Canon Perdido and the WD Smith Building on De la Guerra Street.

Reitz said his company purchased half of the telephone building property from Frontier Communications, the latest phone company to occupy the space since it was built in 1927. However, due to a restriction written into the deed, the property could not become a hotel, and due to decades of old telephone wires in the building contaminating the soil with lead, there could never be housing on the property. 

“So the only solution that worked to purchase and renovate the building is self-storage,” Reitz said.

But in order to make the project economically viable, Reitz said they needed more storage space, so they decided to merge the portion of the telephone building property with a parking lot on De la Guerra Street. That parcel would include the 40 units of housing in the front and storage in the back half. 

Cearnal thanked the board for their frank comments, and said that he understood their suggestions to create some modulation in the buildings by adding elements to separate the structures. But he said his inclination was not to create “faux openings” or a “phony building.” He said he hoped that creating a living wall of ivy-covered storage units would be practical, and since it was set back mid-block, it would “just be seen as green” from the street.

Still, the board was dubious about the success of an ivy wall. And, despite the presence of other tall structures nearby, and the potential for five to seven stories of mixed-use development at Paseo Nuevo, the board objected to the size, bulk, and scale of the project.

“I understand that the size of this project, especially the self-storage, is generated by economics,” boardmember Six said. “But economics is an immediate short-term issue for the developer. This structure that we will see and experience will be here for at least 50 to 100 years.”

There was no official action taken by the board. The project would return for an official hearing once an official application has been completed.